John Meyers Response to Prompt 1

Math is a tool used to solve problems, such as counting how many cows a farmer has or landing a man on the moon. Magic is a form of entertainment intended to create a sense of disbelief in the audience. Oftentimes, magic tricks involve some amount of math to make the trick work. Modular arithmetic can be exploited to create tricks involving a deck of cards. Personally, I'm more a fan of sleight of hand style magic tricks. Once a deck of cards is pulled out and the magician starts shuffling and cutting it in specific ways, it becomes apparent that there is some sort of trick involved, and it just lacks the flair of something like a pigeon seemingly appearing out of thin air. Perhaps I'm just biased against card tricks because I found a "magician's deck" when I was a child that consisted of half normal cards and half aces of hearts that were longer than the other cards, so they could be arranged in the deck to make pairs and shuffled easily while maintaining the pairings. Unfortunately sleight of hand tricks are not mathematically involved, so I doubt we will be doing much with these tricks during this course.